| Front view: |
Rear view: |
| Keyboard: |
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| Connectors: |
My N160 is dual boot, the disk has a smallish 2G Win2K partition, and a 14G FreeBSD -stable partition. The remainder is currently unused, I want at some point FreeBSD -current on it as well.
The installation from the FreeBSD 4.5R cdrom worked like a charm, no tweaking whatsoever was needed. Given the ample disk space I hosted a complete CVS repository on it. A 'cvs co' gave me 4.6-stable source for which the buildworld took roughly 35 minutes.
For more details check the FreeBSD dmesg.boot output.
The N160 has a ATI Radeon Mobility LY (AGP) chipset that drives the LCD and the external VGA connector. It has 8MB of video RAM. The ATI chip drives a 1024x768 TFT LCD.
The brightness control of the LCD backlighting is done via the keyboard, fortunately this keystroke combination also works without Windows drivers and the lot.
I compiled XFree86-4.2.0* from the ports collection. After a bit of tweaking with the /etc/X11/XF86Config file I arrived at one that I'm happy with. The display is really crisp and with good color quality.
I run moused on it, this allows the concurrent use of the PS/2 compatible touchpad and a USB mouse. There is a round 4-way key below the touchpad, sofar that one has not shown signs of life with XFree. Not that I care to be honest.
The keystrokes (Fn/F3) to switch to the external VGA out connector work OK with XFree.
The dual USB ports 'just work'. I have tried a Kensington USB mouse and a Kodak DC3500 digital camera. Both work just dandy. Using moused one can even on the fly plug in the USB mouse and have XFree recognise it without restart. Concurrent use of the touchpad and the USB mouse also works (I was surprised).
The N160 has a builtin Intel chipbased 10/100 Mbit ethernet interface. It works out of the box, no tweaks required. The fxp driver is the one you want.
The builtin sound hardware is recognised out of the box with FreeBSD. The only caveat is that one needs the kernel built with:
option PCI_ENABLE_IO_MODES # Required for N160
Once done a cat /dev/sndstat gives you
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0:
Things like xmms are happy with the ICH3.
The N160 builds on using ACPI for everything. This means the BIOS setup has only minimal configuration settings, ACPI software should take care of the rest.
Unfortunately it also means that there is no APM support. And hence no power management with FreeBSD -stable. In FreeBSD -current ACPI is available but still quite experimental. The lack of powermanagement is really the most annoying part of the N160 while used with FreeBSD. FreeBSD 5.0 & later should have the ACPI code integrated in the kernel, so I stay tuned for that.
As a side effect the laptop does not suspend when I close the lid. It does, however, correctly switch off the LCD. Rather practical IMO. Something to keep in mind is that the disk also does not spin down. Fortunately it appears to be very power efficient and quiet.
There is a 16550A compatible serial port in the N160. Unfortunately this interface is not wired to an external connector. The mini-dock has a serial interface, I suspect that this basically is just wiring up the internal UART chip to the mini-dock.
As I need a serial port ever so often I bought a serial-USB converter. That
fixes the issue. Still, I think the N160 should have had it's UART wired
to a connector. Legacy free..
The N160 is equipped with a FireWire interface. There is no support for
Firewire in FreeBSD yet. Recently a new committer (developer) was welcomed
with specific intentions to work on a FireWire driver stack. We will see
what develops.
The N160 contains a Conexant WinModem which is currently useless for use
with FreeBSD. There is a Lucent WinModem (ltmdm) driver in existence, it
seems something like that exists for the Conexant as well but only for Linux. Until
that happens I'm using a Psion GOLD V34 PCMCIA modem which works just fine
with ppp.
last update $Id: n160.html,v 1.2 2002/08/14 21:15:17 wkb Exp $
Firewire
Builtin modem